Your Eyes Are Drawn Of Charcoal
by fairytalevillain
Summary: For this prompt over at the kink meme: Five times Steve draws Tony while he's unaware, and one time he's watching intently.


**Title:** Your Eyes Are Drawn Of Charcoal.  
**Pairing:** Steve/Tony  
**Rating:** T for a little bit of sex.  
**Summary:** For this prompt at the kink meme: Five times Steve draws Tony while he's unaware, and one time he's watching intently.  
**Notes:** title from the artist by the hush sound. for this kink meme thread : . ?thread=183870#t183870

* * *

1.

It was just after they'd started living together, all of them, in the 'Avengers Mansion' as it had been christened. Loki had just been threatening the city again, and one day they would capture and keep him under control but that day was not today, and he disappeared before any of them could lay a finger on him. They'd all traipsed back into the mansion, utterly exhausted, going their separate ways to their various areas of the house. Most of them made it to their rooms before conking out, but Tony simply wandered into the lounge after letting the entrance hall robots rid him of his suit, and he collapsed, face down, on the nearest sofa.

Steve was at a loss for what to do -he wasn't tired, or hungry or really anything else. He paced up and down every corridor of the mansion, trying not to focus on the eerie silence that had settled over the house. He had decided to attempt to make the television work and try to find something he recognised, maybe an old movie or something, but Tony's soft snores stopped him in the doorway. He was lying sprawled over the sofa, one leg and one arm hanging over the edge, face turned out into the room. He looked so young like this, face relaxed and open and it pained Steve to see him like this, to think about everything he's been through. And that's when Steve decided what to do for the rest of the night.

He tiptoes out of the room, careful not to wake Tony. Speed walking to his room, he grabs his sketchpad and his pencils. He curls up in the armchair opposite Tony and turns the lights up just enough to have shadows playing havoc across his face, and he starts to draw.

Steve had started drawing again just after he'd been unfrozen -drawing everything he didn't understand helped him to understand everything, and it was one thing that he was still capable of doing in this new world. He traces the outline of Tony's face, the slope of his back. It's therapeutic, shading in the angles and contours of the other man, and he manages to finish the face and shoulders before Tony mutters something and turns his face away.

Steve leaves then, knowing that it won't be long until Tony wakes up, and he doesn't want to be caught like this. He feels bad for taking advantage of Tony in his innocence like this, so he sneaks out, heading to his room to put the finishing touches to the picture before hiding it away from prying eyes.

* * *

2.

They're on the helicarrier, heading to somewhere in Europe to fix something and Steve should really be paying attention to what's going on around him, but he's fascinated with the tension in Tony's muscles and the way they flex when he starts hammering and the look of intense concentration on his face when he starts soldering. Steve's kind of jealous of the way that Tony stares at the helmet that he's fixing.

He barely notices when he starts sketching Tony again, in the margins of the brief he'd been given. It starts out as just a few rough lines in the black ballpoint pen he had in his hand, but soon enough he's shading everything, trying his best not to ruin the picture -he's never worked in this medium before, never used anything that wasn't a pencil. Every little line makes Steve hold his breath, worrying that he might make a mistake and hating the fact that he won't be able to get rid of it. He's always been a perfectionist, and some part of him wants to make this little doodle as much of a masterpiece as Tony is trying to make that helmet.

Because Steve loves the irony in that -making a work of art out of someone else making their own stroke of genius. He keeps sketching, not noticing the way Bruce is eyeing him, completely focussed on his subject. Soon enough, Tony is finished with his work, and he starts tidying away -shaking Steve out of his drawing hypnosis. He scrambles to hide the piece of paper he'd been working on, shoving it in one of the pockets of his belt, and when Fury asks later why he's missing parts of the brief, he just shrugs and tells him he must have dropped it somewhere, ignoring the imaginary heat he feels pulsing from that one folded drawing.

* * *

3.

The Avengers have a day off. And this means that they're all slumped in various positions in front of the television, watching a movie that Clint has insisted they watch that involves a lot of exploding cars and half naked women. Steve is lying on one of the couches, his feet in Tony's lap. Tony absently massages them, making Steve shiver with pleasure. Occasionally, during a really tense scene, Tony will squeeze his feet, but Steve doesn't mention it, because he likes watching Tony watch movies. The emotions play out across his face, clear as day, and it's often much more entertaining to watch Tony than the movie.

Steve's sketchpad is propped in his lap, and he had been drawing the flowers on the coffee table (which he was 99% sure that Pepper had bought because none of them ever buy anything as trivial as _flowers_). Upon deciding that Tony is far too engrossed in the movie to pay any attention to Steve, he starts scratching lightly at the pad with the pencil in his hand. He can't decide which emotion to attempt to capture, because they flutter across his features so fast, but Steve starts with the hands wrapped around his feet.

He draws his own feet, which is a weird feeling in and of itself, star spangled socks and all, before working on the large digits wrapped around them. Steve shivers briefly at the feeling of those hands on his body, remembering the night before, but he supresses that before this situation can get embarrassing. He and Tony haven't been together for long, and it was all so new to Steve.

Steve works his way up the arms, committing the muscle and the way the skin covers it to the paper. He remembers the feeling of those arms wrapped around him. He traces up Tony's neck, remembering how Tony shivered underneath him when he nipped and licked that tan column of flesh. Steve rearranges his sketchpad more securely in his lap and tries even harder to avoid those memories.

The strong jaw, ear, nose and hair follow shortly afterwards, but the expression is still curiously blank. Steve pauses there, marvelling at how strange the drawing looks without eyes, without lips. He draws the slow slope of Tony's lips in the smirk he always seems to have, outlining it with the goatee. His eyes are trickier, and Steve tries to capture the sparkle in them as well as he can. He stops when he's finished, wondering at the fact that he managed to draw Tony's face, his expression, purely from memory.

Steve shakes his head, closing the sketchpad and lying it gently on the floor, before turning around to curl into Tony's side.

* * *

4.

Steve had gotten much more adventurous with his drawings recently, and that was why he was currently lying, spread-eagled, on the floor of his room, charcoal in one hand and picture of a very young Tony in the other.

He'd found this picture a while ago, back when he'd thought that cleaning Tony's workshop was an actual possibility. It was of him when he was really little, maybe five or six, and he's sat on what looks like his dad's workshop table, Howard leaning next to him with his arm slung over his son's shoulders. They're both grinning widely at the camera -this is clearly long before Howard started mistreating Tony, and they both look so happy that is makes Steve's heart ache.

Steve smudges one line, blending it out to graduate the dark colour and sighs. He'd taken the photo because it was the one photo that he'd found of Howard, but he doesn't know what had possessed him to draw it. Maybe it was because he wanted to capture Tony's youth, maybe he just wanted to draw the man he maybe loved. He shades in Howard's jacket and thinks about what he went through with the man. How far removed the man who was willing to fly a tin foil plane over enemy territory was from the man that Tony had grown up with.

He adds lines, showing the way Tony's small hand is clutching at the pocket of Howard's blazer. He attempts to capture the gleam in Tony's eyes, the matching shine in Howard's and the unspoken love between them, trying to convey that good man that Steve had known and the good man that Steve knows now. And he resolutely ignores that the papers spread out across Howard's workbench are covered in phrases such as '_INACTIVE_' or '_LAST KNOWN LOCATION_' and are maps of various oceans. And he can't even look at the area where his picture lies, because it just hurts to know that he might have been the cause of some of the distance between father and son.

By the time he's finished, there are black marks up to his elbows and dark smudges across his forehead and cheeks. He's just starting to move the picture to underneath his bed, where all the other pictures are stored, when the door bursts open, and Tony comes flying into the room and flops onto his bed. Steve thanks the lord for his lightning fast reflexes, and before Tony can notice, the drawing and the photograph are hidden in the dark gap beneath the bed.

* * *

5.

Tony's jaw is one of Steve's favourite things to draw, and he loves the way it becomes stronger, more pronounced, when Tony is being _Tony Stark, businessman_. His jaw is set, tension radiating from every other muscle in his body as he stands in front of the journalists at yet another press conference. Steve isn't listening to the words coming out of any of their mouths, instead preferring to focus completely on the sharp cut of Tony's suit, his bruised left eye, from a battle a couple of days ago, that couldn't be completely covered by the makeup Pepper always seems to have.

He stands, ram rod straight, carefully constructed poker face in place as he answers the never ending questions the reporters throw at him. He watches as he verbally sidesteps all of the awkward queries directed at him. Steve draws the elegant arch of one of his eyebrows, the way the carefully placed lights soften his features just _so_.

Steve tries to capture the nervous twitch in Tony's hand that only those who know him best can recognise. Steve aches for Tony, misses him like hell, wishes he didn't have to travel all over to stupid press conferences.

Steve is just starting in on Tony's hair, that is for once actually tame and behaving instead of sticking out at all angles (the way Steve likes it), when he hears one young, naïve reporter straight out ask Tony how he felt about the massive loss of life caused by the fact that the Avengers couldn't stop one little bomb. His head shoots up, eyes locking with Tony's onscreen one's, begging Tony to just hold it together for a little longer, to not explode on the television. Steve knows exactly how much that one incident has been eating away at all of them, but especially Tony -it was an expanded version of one of his old weapons that had caused the destruction of a whole block in downtown Brooklyn.

Tony's mask falters, only slightly, but it's enough for Steve to see the weakness, the anger and the fear. Tony's calm façade slides back into place, pretty rapidly, and he tears down the reporter in his subtle yet charming manner. He moves swiftly on, bringing the interview to a close with a broad, umbrella statement, and he's out of the line of fire. Before Steve can even consider putting the final touches to his drawing, his phone is ringing and Tony's on the other end and Steve can hear the tears in his voice.

Steve soothes him as best he can, demanding that he come home pronto, reminding him that what happened was in no way his fault. Steve murmurs little nothings into the phone, calming Tony down, as he adds in the final details (the scar just above Tony's eyebrow, the final bit of shading on his lips). Tony gets held back another night, and Steve adds this drawing to the ever growing pile underneath his bed. He can't sleep that night -the bed is too big, too empty and too cold and he misses Tony like the desert misses rain.

* * *

+1.

Tony's body arches underneath his ministrations, responding eagerly to every touch, every lick and every nibble. Moans echo around the room, and the feeling of skin on skin after the past couple of days apart is overwhelming for both of them. Steve's main aim tonight is to surround Tony with love, to show that no one blames him for what happened and he doesn't need to feel guilty. So he peppers his face with kisses, presses gentle lips to his neck and down his chest and he cages Tony with his arms. His touches are light, teasing, but Steve knows that this is what Tony needs, and he will never refuse to give Tony what he needs. He whispers '_I love you_' against sweat soaked skin, scatters light butterfly kisses against flushed flesh.

Afterwards, Tony is wrapped in the sheets, and they're staring at each other, the low light making Tony look so much younger than he is, making him look nothing like the stressed man he is publically perceived to be. Steve likes this, that Tony can let his façade down around him; that they can both pull down their walls when they're together. Steve reaches down, fishing underneath the bed for his sketchpad and pencils.

He sits up, leaning against the headboard, sheet thrown haphazardly across his hips. Tony is lying there, prone, sated and doesn't react when Steve starts drawing. It's roughly five minutes later, and Steve has barely even got the shape of Tony's head down when Tony looks up at him, eyes tired, but questioning. Steve raises an eyebrow and Tony cocks his head. Steve laughs at how they can talk without saying a word, before continuing to draw every contour of Tony's face. He takes extra care over the eyes this time, and the kiss swollen lips. The bruise is still there, dark against tan skin and the light blurs the edge, blending the two shades together.

Tony stays still for another half an hour, eyes staring at Steve intently, fascinated by the movement of his hand across the page, before he starts to fidget and breaks the heavy silence.

'Is this the first time you've, y'know…' Tony trails off, gesturing at the pad in his lap.

'Drawn you?' Steve enquires, continuing when Tony nods. 'No, I- I've done it a few times before.' Steve's nervous all of a sudden, and when Tony looks enquiringly at him, he reaches over to pull the other drawings out from underneath the bed.

Tony shuffles through the other pictures carefully, and it's only then that Steve realises how much he's actually drawn Tony -Steve never looks at his pictures once they're finished and hidden. Tony stop short at the charcoal drawing on him with his dad, and Steve's heart drops. But Tony looks up at him, eyes shining and he smiles, really smiles, and throws himself at Steve, wrapping his arms around his neck and kissing him as passionately as he can. Steve laughs, reciprocating the kiss.

'They're beautiful.'

'They're only as good as the subject.'

'Then it's a damn good thing I'm so hot.' Tony answers, kissing Steve again.


End file.
